Farage blocked digital pound for crypto billionaire

A Labour MP has asked parliament’s standards watchdog to investigate whether Nigel Farage broke MPs’ rules by lobbying the Bank of England for his single biggest financial backer.

Phil Brickell, MP for Bolton West and chair of the Commons anti-corruption group, wrote to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Daniel Greenberg, on 3 July asking him to examine a private meeting between Farage and Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey. At stake was the digital pound, a publicly owned alternative to private crypto tokens, and the rules meant to protect it from exactly this kind of pressure.

What got killed

Britain’s savers were the ones with something to lose. On 22 June the Bank scrapped its proposed £20,000 cap on individual stablecoin holdings, replacing it with a £40bn ceiling per coin and letting issuers hold up to 70% of reserves in government bonds. Deputy Governor Sarah Breeden called it “a world-leading regime.” Stablecoins carry no deposit protection and no fraud compensation. If an issuer’s reserves come under pressure, holders queue behind institutional investors for redemption. That is the product Farage was defending when he told the Bank to drop its own digital pound.

The £22m donor

Farage met Bailey in September 2025 and urged him to abandon plans for a state-run digital pound. His backer for that argument is Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based billionaire who holds roughly a 12% stake in Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin issuer. A state-backed digital pound would compete directly with the private currency that makes Harborne rich.

Harborne gave Farage an undeclared personal gift of £5m in 2024, not declared at the time and now under separate investigation by the Electoral Commission and the standards commissioner. He then donated £25,000 in January 2025, a payment that places the September 2025 meeting inside the twelve-month window during which MPs’ rules bar lobbying on behalf of a payer. A further £15m followed between August 2025 and February 2026. Harborne’s total giving to Reform now exceeds £22m, roughly two-thirds of everything the party has raised since it was founded.

Farage has since claimed credit for softening the Bank’s approach. At a crypto industry event in October 2025 he said he was “prepared to go to prison” to stop the digital pound.

The defence

The Bank of England has called the meeting “routine engagement” and says politicians of all parties meet the Governor. No formal inquiry has yet been opened, and the wider industry lobbied against the £20,000 cap too, not Farage alone. Reform says the £5m gift was “unconditional” and has dismissed the lobbying allegation as “utter rubbish.”

None of that changes the arithmetic Brickell has put in front of the commissioner: a billionaire funds two-thirds of a party, its leader meets the Bank of England inside the barred window, and the rule he opposed is gone within the year.